Author: Maura Kenny & Lee Brockington and Betsy Teter
Date/Time: Wednesday 12/02/2026 at 11:00 AM
Book: Annual Holiday Moveable Feast
Synopsis: The Annual Holiday Feast at The Village House features Maura Kenny & Lee Brockington's "Out of Hobcaw" and Betsy Wakefield Teter's "A Carnival of Crimes,"PLUS gift books for everyone! A work in progress for a very long time, but so worth the wait!!! Labeled a "lyrical duet" by historian and curator Dale Rosengarten, "Out of Hobcaw" is a nostalgic recall – visually and verbally – of the land that continues to provide inspiration to artist Maura Kenny and defined historian Lee Brockington's professional life. The work created during Maura's teaching sabbatical from Coastal Carolina University forms the nucleus of her simultaneously serene and vibrant paintings, while Lee's "remembrance of things past" through research, recollection, and interviews weaves compelling history and sentiment, without the sap. Together their longstanding friendship, mutual professional admiration, and shared love for Belle W. Baruch's legacy bring the hidden treasure that is Hobcaw Barony into our sensory and cognitive awareness. Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county's most violent decade—a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents. lllustrated with dozens of photographs, "A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg" delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of the nation’s most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg's first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county and the community becomes one of the South's rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes. A native of Spartanburg, Betsy Wakefield Teter graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in history and began a journalism career that took her to four newspapers across the Carolinas. She served as business editor and Sunday columnist for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and later co-founded the Hub City Writers Project. In two decades as its executive director, she edited and published more than 80 books, including several important Spartanburg community histories. She is a recipient of the South Carolina Governor's Award for the Arts.
Restaurant: The Village House, Litchfield
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